1. Field of Invention
The invention relates to sports equipment, and more particularly to equipment that enables a player to practice striking a ball in a manner similar to actual play of a game.
2. Background Information
In many sports the object is to kick, hit or otherwise strike a ball. The skill of the player in such sports is usually directly related to the player's ability to efficiently and repeatedly strike the ball accurately and with appropriate force. To do this well requires extensive and repeated practice. When a player wishes to practice, however, he or she often finds that it is inconvenient or difficult to recruit another person to throw or otherwise deliver the ball so that the player can practice his or her hitting or kicking. To that end a number of different devices have been developed to enable a single person to practice hitting or kicking without the assistance of any other person. Typical such devices are described and claimed in prior U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,296,582 and 6,514,161.
The more significant of these device is of the type shown in the U.S. Pat. No. 6,514,161 patent in which the ball is tethered to a single vertical pole with the tethers being located at a height appropriate for hitting the ball with a bat as in baseball or softball or swatting the ball with a racquet as in tennis, handball or squash or at a height appropriate for use for kicking the ball as in soccer. For brevity herein, the present invention will usually be described in the embodiment appropriate for baseball or softball batting practice, and will be referred to as a “batting” practice device. It will be understood, however, that this description is for convenience only, and is not limiting, such that the device may be used for practice for a wide variety of various ball striking games, whether the ball is batted, kicked, swatted or struck with a player's hand.
It has been found that with the prior art batting devices, including those shown in the two patents identified above, the service life of the tether and ball portion of the device is often unduly shortened by fraying and breaking of the tether cord, particularly where it is joined to the ball positioner. It has also been found that when the ball it is misstrike additional stresses are placed on the tether cord and on the ball positioner such that the wear on the tether cord is increased. It will be recognized that this is a serious problem since misstriking of the ball occurs quite frequently, as one would expect for a device whose purpose is to allow inexperienced and less experienced batters practice their batting strokes in order to be able to improve their batting skills. When the batting devices are in almost constant use for prolonged periods, as is common for equipment owned and used by sports teams such as school and amateur baseball or softball teams, the misstriking of the ball plus the stresses inherently arising at the connection between the ball positioner and the tether can easily result in the tether portion of the batting device having to be replaced at frequent intervals.
It would therefore be of significant value if the ball striking device could be improved to reduce the stresses on the tether that arise not only from repeated normal use but also from the effects of the ball being repeatedly misstrike, so that the service life of each individual tether unit could be substantially increased.